Someone Who Isn't You
by NinjaSquirls
Summary: It's been two years since I've seen your face. And I just can't find you here.' Everyone has a double in the world beyond the Gate. Ed's found them all...except for one. Postseries, preCoS. Yaoi, RoyEd, EdRandom guy. Couldn't have more angst if I tried.
1. A Stranger Who Looks Like You

**A/N: **Where in hell did this come from?! I was just sitting eating breakfast, perfectly innocent, and I remembered, for no particular reason, that there's no alter Roy in the movie. And bam! This story idea hit me out of nowhere. I spent 3/4 of calculus and half of English lit writing this in my notebook while pretending to work, and then when I got home, I just had to finish it, even though it meant that I couldn't start my homework until 10:00. It was weird. And it's so angsty! It's not even flangst! Just angst! Poor Edo. I might do a follow-up to give it a fluffy ending, or I might make it in the same universe as my drabble for Biscuits of Humor this week (Sophia). Or I might let hanjuuluver use it as the prologue for a story she wants to do, if she ever actually starts it. Anyway, even though it's angsty, I really like this, so I hope you do too.

Rated T for extremely angsty Ed, alcohol abuse and random, meaningless sex with a stranger

**Disclaimer:** You know I don't own FMA. Why must you torment me by making me say it out loud? It hurts enough to think about it.

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**Someone Who Isn't You**

Ed lies awake in his room in the shabby apartment he shares with the young man who is not quite his brother, and the thought that refuses to let him sleep is this: he has never seen Roy on this side of the Gate. In two years of looking without daring to look, he has yet to find this world's alternative to the Colonel he knew; he has never turned a corner and seen the face of the man who could be Mustang, but isn't.

Ed thought he saw him, on more than one occasion; in fact, the first year he saw Roy everywhere he went. In the streets, in shops, in classes he attended at the university, Ed caught glimpses of his hair, his eyes, his smirk, and felt his breath catch and his heart beat faster.

Most often, he would look a second time, and the resemblance would be gone. The hair, on closer inspection, was the wrong shade, or the eyes were the wrong shape, though they had looked like Roy's from a distance.

Sometimes when he got closer Ed would see that, though the man did indeed have Roy's smile, or nose, or ears, or hands, the rest of him was someone else entirely. The false hope from those encounters left a bitter taste in his mouth, and he had nightmares for days in which he transmuted Roy out of bits and pieces of him that were shared by strangers.

One night Ed sat in a bar with a glass of whiskey that was filled, emptied, and refilled more times than he could count, and told the bartender, in a confused jumble of English, German, and Amestrian, that he wanted to go home – though even he didn't know if he meant his apartment two blocks away, or London, or Risembool, or Central – and as he said this, a man walked in. It wasn't him, not quite, though he almost could have been; he was Roy with a thousand tiny imperfections, like whoever had made him had tried to make Roy with only an old photograph to work off. He could have been a cousin, or a son, or a brother. Someone who didn't know Roy that well could have mistaken him for the real thing.

Ed did know Roy that well. Ed knew it wasn't him, not really, but he needed it to be Roy, needed it so badly; it wasn't that hard to lie to himself, and pretend that it was, and the two of them were back at his apartment, shirts and pants rapidly being shed, before he wondered if this was a mistake.

Ed woke up in the morning with a headache and an unfamiliar body in his bed. In the thin light of early morning, free of the haze of alcohol, reality returned painfully, dispelling the tenuous illusion that the man he had slept with was Roy.

When the man rose and stretched, Ed offered him a cup of coffee and the quiet, awkward small talk of one speaking to a stranger. When he gathered his clothes and made to leave, Ed made no move to stop him; he just watched him go. It was only after the door had closed behind his back that Ed realized he had never asked the man his name. He was glad. If he had known it, he might have been tempted to find him again.

Ed was more cautious after that about seeing Roy in the faces of strangers. He still turned his head at the sight of coal-dark hair and charcoal eyes, but he refused to believe what he thought he saw until he was close enough to know it wasn't true anyway. It hurt too much to have his heart broken every time it wasn't him.

And now it has been two years since he came to this world and more than a year since he slept with a man who was almost Roy but wasn't, and as he lies in his bed, unable to sleep, Ed thinks that he has never found the Roy who exists in this world. There was no moment when he saw those features out of the corner of his eye, and told himself it couldn't be, but it was, and he knew it, and then they lived happily ever after. Every time he thought he saw Roy, he was wrong; the man in the bar was the closest he ever got, and even he was a mistake.

Ed doesn't understand why he's never seen him. There are logical explanations of course, but none of them makes any sense.

There is always the possibility that Roy lives far away in this world, China or Japan or Australia or somewhere else that Ed has never been because it would take almost as long as he's been in this world to get there. Ed doesn't believe that, though. It doesn't make sense that Roy would be put out of his reach in this world.

Roy is the only one he hasn't found. Ed cannot explain it, and he refuses to ask Hohenheim, but even though their names and lives are completely different, some fragile thread links him to the people of this world who are the people of his world. He seeks them out, these people who resemble people he knew once, out of what he supposes is a misguided attempt to recreate Amestris in this place; the part of him that is comforted by the familiar, that longs to go home, fights an endless battle with the part of him that argues, rationally, that they are not the same people, that he is twisted, that he is obsessed with the past.

In truth, Ed thinks that it wouldn't matter if he looked for them or not; they were drawn to him, or he was drawn to them, out of some strange link they share, and he would have found them no matter what. All except Roy.

Roy is only one he hasn't found.

He can't help thinking about the others.

Winry's name was Melissa, and she lived next door to him in London. She told him she wanted to go to America and become an actress, or stay at home and become a teacher. She never threw wrenches at him, although once she had hit him with a book. He wrote to her once a week.

He saw Armstrong at many of the fairs where he displayed his rocketry; the man was the Strongman in a traveling sideshow.

Ed saw Izumi, though her husband called her Elaine. They ran a boarding house in Paris that he stayed in on his way from London to Munich, and there were four children who ran constantly in and out, laughing, shrieking, and playing. Before he left, Ed told her she was a wonderful mother.

Riza owned a tavern near his apartment, one of the few in town where the serving girls went unmolested, because the men knew they would have to face down her.

Ed almost tripped over Havoc, who was sprawled across the steps in front of the dining hall at Munich University, where Hohenheim taught and Ed took classes sporadically, and once he stopped laughing, he introduced himself as Armand. He was Ed's first friend in Germany, because he was kind-hearted and easy-going. Second-hand smoke bothered him to no end, though.

Fuery was a silent, squeaking engineering student when Ed met him. He was too shy to speak to him, or anyone else; Ed finally had to ask one of the professors to learn his name was Lukas. His fellow students consider his most impressive accomplishment to be the introduction of Lukas to Armand, and are continually disbelieving that, not only did Lukas not die of embarrassment the first time they talked to each other, but he was the one to suggest a first date.

Ed walked into the flower store two doors down from his apartment and Hughes was standing there talking up the shop owner. Ed walked out the door again, and straight into the nearest bar; he doesn't remember the next three days very well, although he does remember waking up in the street, and the strange looks his neighbors gave him for weeks afterward. The first time Hughes talked to him, he burst into tears. It wasn't fair that this world had a Hughes while his didn't.

A year and a day after he came through the Gate, a friend of his father's introduced him to Alphons at a lecture on rocketry, and Ed couldn't say a word. He just stood and stared, and Alphons glared at him and walked away. Ed found him outside afterward and apologized, saying he looked like Ed's brother. Two weeks later, when he needed a place to stay, Al offered to let him move into his apartment. Ed never asked him why he would open himself so much to a young man he barely knew. He doesn't want to know the answer.

Ed sometimes feels guilty for the way he treats Alphons. Sometimes he forgets that he is not his brother, that he has an identity of his own, and he knows that it isn't fair to treat him like he is the person Ed left behind. When he remembers that, however, he always ends up punishing him for not living up to his expectations, for not being the person Ed wants him to be, and that isn't fair either. On nights like tonight, Ed is willing to admit that the best thing for Al would probably be for him to leave.

That is never going to happen, though.

To Ed, it only makes sense that if there is another Roy, he should be drawn to Ed as the others have. He and Ed should have run into each other by now. But they haven't.

On a night like tonight, Ed cannot banish doubt and fear. There is always the possibility that one of those times he thought he saw Roy, he really did. There is always a chance he didn't know Roy as well as he thought he did, that his memory was faulty, that he spent so much time looking that he just didn't see.

There is a chance that he let Roy walk out his door the morning after without asking his name, and lost him forever.

Ed doesn't believe this, however. He would know Roy if he saw him, he is sure.

Ed refuses to entertain the possibility that Roy has been killed in this world. If he admits that, he would have to admit the possibility that Roy is dead in his.

It has been two years since he came to this world, and Ed has not found the Roy that belongs here. Ed blames the Gate for this. He has to; he doesn't believe in God. He wonders sometimes if this is part of his sacrifice, that it wasn't enough for the Gate to take him away from his world, that it keeps him from ever finding the man who should be Roy just to see him suffer.

Tonight, he lies awake and wonders if it is better this way. He doesn't even know what he would do if he ever found this man; could he just walk up and say hello? Ed isn't sure he is capable of doing that.

And even if he did, what then?

No matter what he looked like, the man wouldn't be Roy, any more than Alphons was Al. He would have a life and a past of his own, most of which Ed would never know and none of which included him. He wouldn't know Ed, wouldn't recognize him. He wouldn't remember him and all the things they had shared, because for him there wouldn't be any. He wouldn't be in love. He wouldn't be Roy, just some man who looked like him.

It would probably hurt as much to see this man, who was Roy in every sense except for the only ones that mattered, as it did to see those men who almost were, but failed at second glance. It would probably be worse, because every sight of him would be a reminder of what he should have been, and wasn't.

Part of Ed tries to tell him that something, anything, is better than nothing, which is what he has now. At least he wouldn't be alone. At least he could pretend it was Roy.

Part of him thinks that anything – even nothing – would be better than that. Part of him says he can't love a lie. Part of him says he can't break his heart, not again, not like this.

It would hurt too much.

And Ed knows that the worst thing of all, perhaps, would be if this Roy did love him. Because he would never be able to resist temptation. Because he would want it too much and need it too much, and so he would always give in, even though he knew it was a mistake.

Because he would look into his eyes and never see the man in front of him, but another man in another world who loved him as well, and every time this man touched him, Ed would feel that man instead, and every time he said, "I love you," he would be saying it to that man instead, and Ed never wanted to be that cruel.

Because if Ed fell in love, he would have second thoughts about leaving. And Ed couldn't afford anything that threatened to keep him here. Not when he had so much to lose by staying. Ed didn't want to make that mistake.

Ed wanted to go home.

As he lies there, Ed's eyes slip closed, and his breathing becomes slow and even, and he is finally able to sleep. He has the same dream he does every night. It is of a face he hasn't seen, even once, in two years, except in his sleep, and he wakes up, as he does every morning, with tears in his eyes.

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A/N: Seriously, was that angsty, or what! I don't know what chasm of my soul this came from. Now review, and tell me if you enjoyed the angst! 


	2. Omoide no Kakera wo Atsumeteru

**A/N**: Curse you, evil angsty plot bunnies! Why must you fill my brain with angsty-ness? I really don't know where this story came from, but I blame my emo-muse Hamlet, because gods, it is angsty. If you hadn't already picked up on that. And I sure hope you like it, because I spent a number of hours that, really, should have been devoted to the study of evil math and evil math based science (damn you Calculus! Damn you physics!), and probably Lit as well. I am quickly becoming a pathetic slacker. Anyway, story-wise, this is more or less what Roy is doing while Ed is being a mess on the other side of the Gate, so it takes place at approximately the same time as the events in Chpater One. And for anyone who is alert enough to notice, I did realize about halfway through that I said in Chapter One that Hughes was dead, while here is clearly not - I don't care. Pretend he faked his death or something. I needed him.

Rated T for serious alcohol abuse, (attempted) suicide, and just generally Roy being an angsty mess.

PS: Non-Conqueror of Shamballa compliant. Even though the eye-patch was sexy, I prefer non-crippled, not-in-Siberia Roy.

Disclaimer: If you think I look like I own FMA, you have many serious problems, and I'm probably the least of them.

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**Omoide no Kakera wo Atsumeteru**

(I'm gathering up pieces of my memory)

Roy sits in a chair in the study of a house that feels empty even of him, and the thought that he clings to is this: the person standing in front of him is not Ed. No matter what he looks like, no matter what he sounds like, no matter what he says, he is not Ed.

He forces himself to remember that Ed cannot be standing there looking at him, because Ed has been gone for two years. No, he reminds himself, not gone; gone implies that he is somewhere else, that he might come back. Ed died, two years ago, gave his life for his brother's in a city underground. Ed died. He is never coming back.

He sits very still in his chair and says this, over and over, unwilling to let his resolve weaken and fade. He knows that this creature is nothing, a product of his splintered, cracking mind and his loss and his desperation, and in a few seconds, or minutes, or hours, it will vanish and he will be alone again.

That is what happens every time. He wonders why he does this to himself.

Every time it happens he swears it will be the last time, swears that next week he will stay drunk, next week he won't sit up and wait, next week he won't see him, next week he will start to forget and let him go. It never works. Every Sunday he wakes up and the hand that reaches for a drink finds only empty bottles, and he spends all day painfully sober, and when night falls, it falls on him in the study, waiting for Ed.

He doesn't know why he does this. It probably makes things worse. Every time he sees this thing that isn't Ed, it is a seed of pathetic, irrational hope – maybe he is real, maybe he has returned, maybe he can take him in his arms without him dissolving, disappearing. Every time it isn't true, he feels the half-healed wounds of grief harshly ripped open again. Some days he wonders if he could bleed to death, if he did this enough times.

Roy doesn't want to forget, though. Even if it hurts, he wants to remember Ed's face, and his voice, and everything he lost when he died. So, while he spends most of his week trying desperately to forget, he sets aside this one night to sift through whatever shards of memory are left.

He had a year with Ed, a year that wasn't happy but was the closest he thought he could ever hope to get, a year of something he would call love if that hadn't seemed so inadequate to describe it. And then everything changed, and Roy had two years to learn what it was like to live without Ed, two years of thinking of him and dreaming of him and missing him. Tonight, sitting in a chair, looking at this thing that, he reminds himself, isn't Ed, it is those two years he remembers.

When Roy woke up in the hospital, Hughes was sitting next to his bed, asleep with his chin on his chest. When he turned to the other side, he could see a second bed, but he didn't recognize the boy who slept there – or rather, he was vaguely familiar, but he was unable to put a name to the face, or even decide where he'd seen him before.

Hughes woke up when Roy moved, and the man immediately starting talking. He asked Roy how he was feeling, and whether he hurt anywhere, and told him how long he'd been unconscious, and how Riza had gotten him away from the Fuhrer's mansion, and how lucky he was that he hadn't lost his eye, and…when he stopped to take a breath, Roy asked him where Ed was. Hughes wouldn't meet his eyes.

When he asked him who the boy was, Hughes said it was Al. That was when Roy knew something had happened.

It was three days before he had the entire story. Three days before he could get Hughes to tell him how a team had been sent into the city underground to find the brothers after Rose had emerged, hysterical and raving about homunculi and Philosopher's Stones and human transmutation. How they found Al barely conscious amidst the ruins, lying in a transmutation circle in a room soaked in blood. How Al couldn't tell them anything, because he was half out of his mind shrieking about his brother, and had to be drugged into oblivion before they could touch him, let alone get him out. How there was no sign of Ed.

Roy saw the look of pity and sympathy and grief on Hughes' face, and found himself thinking of all the times Hughes had told him he was too involved with the Elric brothers, and that someday he would get hurt.

He had always known Hughes was right. He just hadn't been able to stop himself.

The second the stern-faced general had signed the forms that returned him to duty after he was released from the hospital, Roy had filed a request that his next assignment be to find and return the missing Fullmetal Alchemist. Not only had they granted his request; they had given him his entire team to help him. He doesn't acknowledge that, had they refused, he probably would have left anyway, even if they had labeled him a traitor and a deserter.

Roy spent a year looking for Ed. No one seemed to know where he could have gone, even Al, and why he hadn't come back, but he tried. There were many leads, the first months, a thousand people who thought they had seen someone who looked like Ed, or heard rumors of someone who could do alchemy without a circle. Roy followed every single one, hoping or praying or fearing that one of them would be right and that he'd find the boy. He spent nights in towns too small to have names because someone had reported seeing a boy in a red coat walking down the street. He ate bad train food for more meals than he could count as he crossed the country a dozen times over following rumor and gossip and misinformation.

It was never Ed. The person who'd sent for him would drag him over and point at someone and ask if that was the boy who he was looking for, and it never was. Most of the time, it wasn't even close. And after a thousand dead ends and false leads, they started to dry up completely. A day would go by with no new reports, then two days, then a week. The country began to forget the Hero of the People. It began to move on to other things.

A year and a day after the Fullmetal Alchemist disappeared, the military officially closed all investigations on him and declared him dead.

Roy went to the funeral. He stood, wooden and stiff, one hand on the shaking shoulder of a sobbing Alphonse, as they lowered Ed's empty casket into the ground. The priest offered empty platitudes and vague appeals to a god that Roy knew Ed had never believed in. People who didn't know Ed said things about him that were kind and inaccurate.

Roy didn't hear them. All his concentration went into that look of stiff control, in maintaining the façade of a commander who had lost a subordinate and a colleague, rather than a man who had lost everything that mattered. What thought he had left he used to remember Ed as he had been the last time Roy saw him. While Al wailed and Winry wept and the priest droned on, Roy traced every thread of hair that had escaped Ed's tie, every smudge of dust that had marred his coat, every scrape on his boots. He saw the light that flickered across Ed's eyes and said 'I love you' and the tight grin that stretched his lips and said 'don't die.' He heard Ed's voice, calm and self-assured and cocky, and felt Ed's hand touch his lightly in a gesture that he wished desperately had been more. He remembered saying goodbye.

Roy never visited the grave. It would have been too easy to stand there and pretend that because it was empty, Ed wasn't really dead. And it was already hard enough not to convince himself that that was true.

They let a year go by and then they signed a piece of paper and suddenly Ed went from somewhere out there to dead and never coming back, and Roy wondered dully some nights who gave them the power to kill him.

There wasn't any point in looking for a dead man, or so the military told him when he received the papers that returned him indefinitely to his building and his office and his desk and his paperwork in Central. They seemed to expect him to be able to pick up where he left off, as if nothing had changed. Sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, he waited for hours for a booted foot to kick the door open with a slam, for a small form to throw itself down on his couch with a flutter of red, for a loud voice to fill the silent room with jokes and insults and threats and dramatic exclamations.

Everything had changed.

Everyone else in the office kept their eyes on their work, and pretended they couldn't hear him crying.

Predictably, it was Hughes who first noticed that Roy was spending more and more of his time in the back of the library, taking complicated notes out of books that hadn't been touched since the Elric brothers had used them. It was Hughes who saw him at the store checking things off a list and thought it a bit odd. It was Hughes who remembered what had happened the last time Roy started acting like that.

Hughes had walked into the room and seen the array painted on the floor, and he just shook his head and asked him how he could do such a thing. Roy sat on the floor with the brush still wet in his hand, remembering the feel of Hughes' hand meeting his jaw the last time he had tried to bring someone back from the dead. He asked Hughes what else he was supposed to do. Hughes asked him what he hoped to accomplish by attempting the impossible. Roy remembered the gleam of sunlight on metal limbs that replaced flesh torn away because it was impossible to succeed at this. He told Hughes it didn't matter and he didn't really care.

After Hughes finished hitting him, he made him swear that he wouldn't try to bring Ed back, not ever, and to make it easier he stood over Roy while he scraped the paint off the floor and locked and barred the room and burned all his notes to ash.

Two weeks after that and it had been fifteen months since Ed disappeared and three since he died, and Roy sat at his desk and watched the blood drip onto the floor. He saw blood well, thick and dark, from the gashes down his forearms, and felt the knife tumble from his helpless fingers, and it hurt, a deep fiery ache pulsing up his arms, and he wondered if Ed had been in pain when he died, and it didn't matter that it hurt because he was fading into a place where Ed was.

He was too far gone to hear the shouting outside his door, or the pounding against it, or the shattering wood when it was kicked open. He did feel it, vaguely, from a distance, when Hughes' body crashed against him, a heavy weight that tried to keep him from escaping into nothing, clinging and sobbing and holding him and screaming for help and why wouldn't he let him go?

He woke to the flat white ceiling of a room he immediately recognized as being in Hughes and Gracia's apartment, and when he looked over, Hughes was there, like he always was, beside the bed.

Hughes said Roy needed to stay with him and his wife until he recovered because he was too weak to be alone. Roy knew he just wanted the chance to watch over him and make sure he didn't try it again. It hurt to know Hughes didn't trust him; it hurt more to know that he was right not to.

Hughes was always right, and Roy always hated it.

The bandages were still snow white and tight around his wrists when he walked into the bar and ordered a drink. He'd only been home again for three hours and it was already unbearable again, and he didn't want to prove Hughes right by trying it again, so he walked out in the rain to a bar where no one would ask why he was drinking.

He found that the whiskey burning in his blood blunted the pain that was still fresh, sixteen months after Ed had vanished. He found that the oblivious haze of alcohol obscured his memory and left his mind blank and blissful. For the first time in sixteen months, he didn't think about Ed at all. It was a dark sort of peace.

It wasn't really moving on. But it eased the pain a little, and what else mattered?

Roy started to seek out the bliss that came with drinking himself into oblivion. At first, he did it rarely. He tried each time to hold out as long as possible, to endure the emptiness and the grief and the silence of his house and the meaningless babble that surrounded him at work until he felt that he was about to break, until his heart and mind and maybe even his body were about to shatter into a million jagged pieces, and then he would go out after work to a bar and drink enough that the morning after he couldn't remember the night before.

It wasn't very long before the two weeks in between binges became one week, and then five days, and then three. It was just too hard – waiting was too hard; coming back was too hard; remembering again was too hard. It was too hard, and the pain was killing him, and he just wanted it to go away.

He just wanted to forget.

The first time he came into the office late, miserable and hung-over, Riza was furious with him. She unloaded an entire clip into the wall above his head, and lectured him for over an hour about unprofessional behavior and improper coping strategies.

Promises came easily to his lips, but he forgot them quickly, because the pain always seemed more important than the consequences.

It wasn't very long before Riza stopped lecturing him and just started looking away when she saw his reddened eyes and wrinkled clothes. He hated the look of tired disappointment in her eyes every time she saw him, but he didn't know what to do.

Eighteen months since Ed had disappeared, and six since he had died, and Roy no longer had binges, because that would require moments of sobriety between one binge and the next, and those no longer existed; there was only the time it took between finishing one glass and pouring the next. Days started to bleed together, because time no longer mattered; minutes were measured in swallows, hours in glasses, days in bottles.

Roy accompanied breakfast every morning, or replaced it, with the first shot of whiskey, which served to banish the remnants of nightmares. If he was shaking too much, there was a second shot, and sometimes a third, before he left the house. When he reached his office, there was a door that he always locked as soon as he arrived and a drawer in his desk that always contained at least one bottle, and then he was gone. When he left work at the end of the day, it wasn't much of a transition; he went from sitting at his desk in a drunken haze to sitting in a bar in a drunken haze to passing out at home (and sometimes elsewhere) in a drunken haze.

He was only dimly aware of the other people that moved silently through this charade of life. Riza answered the phone in the middle of the night when Roy was passed out in the bar or too muddled to find his way home, and picked him up and drove him home in stony silence. Havoc and Fuery and Breda and Falman took it upon themselves to keep his condition a secret from his superiors; they kept guard outside his office, finished the paperwork he couldn't do, made up excuses for missed meetings and disheveled clothes, cleaned him up before supposedly surprise inspections.

Hughes came into his office to beg and plead and shout and sometimes hit him and tell him he was killing himself, destroying himself and he had to move on, he had to let Ed go, but what else was he drinking for if it wasn't to let Ed go? But if he said that, Hughes just shook his head and said softly that if Roy was so set on dying, he couldn't stop him, and then he would leave again.

He still came back the next day, though.

Roy doesn't remember when he first started seeing Ed. He isn't sure, anymore, if he really just didn't remember, or if he made himself forget, or if it was merely that it happened when his mind was already started to crack and splinter under the constant influence of alcohol.

He does remember that it started slowly. Walking down a hallway, he would hear Ed's voice saying his name, but when he turned, it was just a Private asking him if he needed anything. Waiting in line at the store where he bought his meager groceries, he'd see Ed walk in the door, but before he could even think to approach him, he'd be gone, somehow replaced by a stranger.

There was nothing alarming in mistaken identity, he told himself. It had happened before, he reassured himself, in the year he spent searching for Ed. He shook it off, quieted his fears with more whiskey, tried not to think about it any more.

He remembers being scared when he began seeing Ed and hearing Ed when he knew that there was no one there. The half-seen flickers of red in the corner of his eye, the window in the rain that almost reflected something that couldn't be there, the whisper that he could probably have imagined, it was all disturbing. He worried that he was going insane, and then he wondered why he cared if he was.

He mostly blamed it on the alcohol, and tried to fix it by drinking more.

The strange thing was that the first time that creature who wasn't Ed appeared, he was as sober as he'd been in weeks. It was one of his rare days off, and he had forgotten that he didn't have work, hadn't even known what day it was, and so he'd forgotten that he was almost out of whiskey at home and that no one could sell it on Sundays.

Being sober made him remember why he spent so much time being drunk. All the memories he put so much energy into pushing away came back, and he'd thought that time might blunt the sharpness of them, but it hadn't, and he half-expected to see blood soaking the floor because it hurt so much.

He sat at the table with his head in his hands, and suddenly Ed was there. Just like that. He looked exactly like Roy remembered him – same braided blonde hair, same black shirt and leather pants and long red cloak, same golden eyes, same arrogant grin. He hadn't changed at all.

Then he stepped closer, and he said Roy's name, and Roy knew he'd finally come back, knew that he'd been right to believe he couldn't really be dead, right to believe that he'd return someday, because he was standing there in front of him as if he'd never left.

When Roy stood up and reached out to touch him, though, his hands met nothing but empty air, and suddenly there was nothing there again, and Roy was all alone.

When Hughes had opened his door, Roy thrust a packet containing every photograph he owned of Ed, and told the other man he wanted him to keep them. He said he was afraid if he looked at them any longer he would lose his mind and burn them all to ash. He didn't tell Hughes that he'd seen Ed in his kitchen.

That was the first time, and it wasn't the last. The next Sunday found him sitting in his study, sober once again. He could have said he'd forgotten, in his haze, to buy more whiskey, but it would have been a lie. If it was forgetting, it was deliberate, born out of a morbid curiosity.

This time, when Ed appeared, Roy tried not to give in to his need to touch him, his desperate desire to confirm that it was really him and that he was really here. He tried to content himself with seeing his face and hearing his voice. He tried to believe him when he said he'd come back and that he wouldn't leave again. He tried to remember, rather than forget.

And when this thing that wasn't Ed vanished, as he had known it would, he tried not to cry.

Two years since Ed disappeared and one since he died, and Roy sits in the chair in his study and wonders why he does this, because it makes no sense. He spends every second of every day drunk so that he doesn't have to remember, but every Sunday night he sits here talking to a ghost because he can't stand to forget and he doesn't know how to move on.

It is a form of self-mortification, a way of paying for his sins, for letting Ed die, by forcing himself to endure the agony of losing him over and over again, by never giving time a chance to heal his wounds, by getting as close as he can to the pain he knows Ed must have felt. He does this because he wants to hurt as much as possible.

It is a form of suicide. Like the drinking, it is a way of dying slowly enough that no one can stop him until it is too late. He digs the knife into the wounds of his heart, and watches it bleed, and feels himself slip a little farther away from the world. It is possible to die from a broken heart, and that is what is happening to him. He does this because without Ed there is nothing worth living for.

It is a form of love, because he cannot lose what little he has left of Ed. As much as it hurts, as much as he hates this, hates missing Ed so much, hates that he has been reduced to an empty shell through his attempts to forget, he can't. He clings to these brief moments of almost being with Ed, the scraps of memory that he still holds. He does this because if he forgets Ed, he really will be dead, and he loves him too much to lose him like that.

Finally, as it always does, Roy's resolve breaks, and he forgets that this creature is not really Ed, and stretches out a hand to brush against his face, and when he does that, he is gone, and Roy is alone again.

He rises slowly, and walks up the stairs to his room, and throws himself down on his too-large, too-empty bed, and tries and fails not to think of Ed; and he falls asleep, as he does every night, with tears in his eyes.

* * *

**A/N:** Just so you know, the title is a line from UNDO, hanjuuluver's favorite FMA opener. I like Rewrite better, but UNDO has cooler lines when you translate it into English, so there you go. Anyway, it just seemed like a fitting title. 


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